Whole Education

Case Study: Oasis Academy Lord’s Hill

Paul Ibbott, Head of Music at Oasis Academy Lord’s Hill, explains their approach to Musical Futures:

“Music at my school has had a difficult history. When I joined the school, there had been no music teacher for two years. Building a new department from scratch was a challenge and in some respects my work was successful. Students often said music was their favourite subject, but this wasn’t translated into good GCSE candidates and Key Stage 4 attainment seemed to reach a low plateau."

"I attended a Musical Futures training day, where I realised that the attainment plateau was little to do with ability and everything to do with engagement – what I was offering was not really exciting the students. I also realised a blindingly obvious fact: I was not teaching music in the way I learnt music. Although I had a certain amount of classical training, the majority of what I knew about music was learnt in my mate’s front room trying to emulate my favourite musicians, writing songs and arranging them for different instrumental groups – and I wasn’t even aware I was learning. On the other hand, my students were being fed a wide range of styles and traditions which had little personal significance for them and which, with one or two exceptions, seemed to be dousing any spark of interest in studying music. The Musical Futures training day gave me ‘permission’ to experiment and do something different, not for the sake of doing it differently, but because the informal approach chimed with my own experience.”

“I opened my first Musical Futures lessons by explaining to students that while I was still ‘Sir’, a new relationship was going to develop whereby the students themselves would identify what they wanted to learn, and I would give them help as and when they asked for it. The students were given their first task – to get into friendship groups and choose a song that they would like to try to copy. At the end of the unit I gave all Year 9 students a questionnaire about Musical Futures so far. Nearly all students said they preferred Musical Futures lessons to previous lessons and felt they had made progress in learning instruments. Many students were pleased to be trusted to work unsupervised, and identified that learning how to get on in groups was an important skill being developed.”

Impact

As the Head of Music explains, “students have been setting their own objectives and assessing their progress against their own ideas of what success is…The engagement of students and ignition of musical passion in more musically-able students has been evident…Once students experience Musical Futures, they do not want to go back to ‘traditional’ lessons. They value the responsibility and trust placed in them very highly indeed.”

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